Breathless [McKnight, Perth & Daire 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Beth D. Carter

  She’d once told him everyone liked kink in their sex. Guess he hadn’t believed her. Well, now his eyes have been opened wide. She might look like a pristine goody-goody girl, but she could be downright wicked.

  All thoughts of naughtiness got pushed aside as the door opened. Immediately, she got hit with a pull, very insistent, from inside the darkened house. Brandy’s father, Walter, stood stooped and grief faced. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair probably hadn’t seen a comb in days, and his clothes rivaled the skin of a shar-pei puppy.

  Alastair and Nash held up their badges. “Mr. Hamlet, I’m Agent Hawke and this is Agent McKnight. I contacted you yesterday.”

  “Yes,” Walter Hamlet said. He stood back. “Please come in.”

  They walked into the house, which had become a shrine to Brandy. The living room was full of pictures of the girl, some framed but most taped and propped up. Window curtains had been drawn, leaving lamps the only source of light. A woman half reclined on the couch, a blanket covering her. Tears ran down her cheeks as she adjusted herself to sit up.

  “This is my wife, Ruth,” Walter introduced.

  “Mrs. Hamlet,” Alastair greeted. “Thank you both for agreeing to see us.”

  “You said you had a new lead in our daughter’s…death?” He had to swallow hard before he said the last word.

  “Yes, sir.” Alastair swept his arm toward Charlotte and Jonas. “May I introduce my associates, Detective Jonas Daire and Miss Charlotte Perth.”

  Walter and Ruth gave them each a nod, although Charlotte could see the question in their eyes.

  “A new witness has come forth on something that happened twelve years ago at the pool,” Nash informed them.

  “And this is relevant to Brandy?” Ruth asked in a grief-torn voice.

  “I’m afraid so,” Nash answered. “This witness states that she was deliberately held under the water by a hand in her hair. A worker came by and scared off the attacker.”

  Charlotte watched the information sink in.

  “Was this girl swimming alone?”

  Alastair nodded. “Everything mimics your daughter’s accident.”

  “If this is true, then it’s no accident,” Ruth whispered.

  “You’re right,” Alastair agreed softly. “I apologize.”

  “Why weren’t we told about this?” Walter asked.

  “Because the girl never came forward, until now,” Alastair continued. “Fear can make us do things we wouldn’t normally consider doing. It’s easy to forget or to ignore something terrifying, especially when one considers the age of the victim.”

  “Brandy was sixteen,” Ruth told him.

  “And the other victim had been eighteen. What’s important now is that she did come forward and we can search for the person who did this to your daughter.”

  “How can we help you?” Walter asked.

  Alastair caught Charlotte’s eye and gave a forward motion with his head and she came to stand by his side.

  “What I’m going to do is ask that you trust me,” Alastair told them and then he looked at Charlotte. “Can you feel her?”

  “Yes.” She looked at Walter and Ruth. “May I go to your daughter’s bedroom?”

  Hesitantly, they gave a stiff nod.

  Charlotte followed the pull down the darkened hallway that led to the bedrooms. Ice settled into her chest and she felt a little sick to her stomach. The doors had been pulled shut, so she had no idea which room belonged to Brandy, and she was conscious of eyes watching her. At the end of the hall, she turned to the right and opened it, ignoring the small sound of surprise that Ruth emitted.

  Brandy’s spirit swirled in the room. Not in form, no she wasn’t present in any kind of physical way, but that didn’t diminish the hold she had on her possessions. Charlotte took her time, studying every item. Posters featuring Michael Phelps and Missy Franklin were interspaced with the faces of One Direction and Justin Bieber. The vanity had so many jars of lotions, perfumes, and nail polish mingling with forgotten hair ties, jewelry, and lip gloss that it looked like a girly bomb had exploded on the surface. Several pairs of swim goggles hung off the bedframe. A red swimsuit had been draped over the vanity chair and a towel lay draped over the closet doorknob. Shoes were thrown haphazardly across the floor and books were piled on the still unmade bed.

  The room reminded Charlotte of her own when she had been a teenager and lump rose in her throat. After what had happened to her, she’d abandoned everything, just walked away and let her mother deal with the repercussions of dismantling her daughter’s room. The only difference was Annie hadn’t had to bury Charlotte. When Ruth felt it was time to finally pack away Brandy’s things, it would be done knowing that she’d never see her again. Not in this lifetime, at least.

  She reached up and wiped the tear off her cheek and felt Nash and Jonas move in behind her. She figured the rest of them, Alastair and the Hamlets, were there, too, but she concentrated on the solid presence of both her men. That gave her a moment of pause, to think of them as her men. It may not be conventional but it sure made her heart swell.

  As she refocused, one item really pulsed, grabbing her attention, and made her gravitate toward the bed. The sheets were pink. The duvet was cream. But it wasn’t any of the décor that interested her. She picked up the pillow and a silver medal at the end of a red, white, and blue ribbon rested upon the mattress. While everything called to her, this piece buzzed the loudest so she reached out and picked it up. Taking a deep breath, she concentrated on it as it pulled her into Brandy’s vision.

  Charlotte found herself at a swim meet. She didn’t need to hear the obvious happiness of the crowd as they cheered on the lane of swimmers to recognize the scene. She’d been to dozens of them in her competition days. She eyed the water warily, feeling anxiety well up inside her. She moved back but bumped into a concrete wall. When her area of escape disappeared her heart began to hammer erratically.

  Full-blown panic threatened to settle in, to consume her, and for a split second she let it take over. Thousands of prickly sensations ran across her skin, as if she’d fallen into an ant hill. She was on the verge of complete meltdown when a light hit her eyes, blinding her. She threw up a hand but the diversion broke through her fear long enough for her mind to remember that she was in a vision. The water was nothing more than an illusion and couldn’t hurt her.

  Once that thought settled in, Charlotte forced herself to start analyzing the scene around her. She took a step closer to the pool, trying to figure out what she was seeing. Six lanes, three swimmers stood around one edge, cheering on the one in the water. Freestyle. All right, four hundred meter relay. She began to study each girl and recognized the one on the diving platform, ready to fishtail it into the pool. Brandy Hamlet.

  A second later Brandy dove in and Charlotte watched her with a critical eye. The first thing she noticed was that Brandy had been well trained, but while no one could fault the technical aspect of Brandy’s technique, she lacked the swiftness of the swimmer currently in first place.

  The race was over a little more than a minute later. Brandy Hamlet pulled into second place and once again, sunlight flashed in her eyes, only now she realized it was Brandy’s silver medal.

  Then the vision changed and Charlotte found herself beside the outdoor pool at the swim club, at the very end where she had almost died. Only now, Brandy swam alone. Charlotte watched her, again and again, over and over, pushing herself.

  “You were the weak link, weren’t you, Brandy?” she asked. “That’s why you’re here alone even though your arms are aching, your shoulders are burning and your leg muscles are threatening to cramp.”

  Brandy ignored her. She just kept at her rigorous pace.

  “You need to prove to them all that you deserve to be on the relay. What’s your dream, Brandy? The Olympics? Because that was mine. Until he took it away from me.”

  Suddenly Brandy was no longer in the water. In the blink of an eye she had transported herself
from the pool to standing in front of Charlotte. Brandy’s eyes were almost black with rage and she screamed at Charlotte. For once, she was glad she couldn’t hear anything in the visions. She could only imagine the hatred spewing from Brandy’s mouth.

  But Brandy pointed back toward the pool and Charlotte looked up. She saw a shadow on the wall, larger than normal, due to the contortion of the illuminated water. It grew as the man crept closer. Brandy disappeared in front of her and Charlotte saw her swimming in the water. The Freestyle was about endurance, having the upper body strength to push through the resistance of not only cardiovascular and muscle fatigue but the force of the water. It meant practice, practice, practice.

  Charlotte watched as Brandy finished her lap and held onto the side as she recovered her breath, panting with exertion. She’d been there, in Brandy’s shoes, doing the same thing and presenting the opportunity for a psycho to act on his evil impulse. And like a scene from a bad horror film, Charlotte watched it happen. She was paralyzed with fear as she saw the blurry figure of a man walk over to the still recouping girl. A second later he pushed her under, the fingers tangling in the hair. Brandy thrashed, she fought like a demon against the force that held her, but Charlotte knew all too well what Brandy was up against.

  “She’s too tired,” Charlotte whispered, watching the scene in absolute horror because, in a way, she was watching her own death. “Her muscles are too fatigued to fight back, the sides of the pool too slick to grab onto. There’s no leverage. He controls everything because he has the power.”

  She collapsed to her knees and started crying. And then the man disappeared and Brandy knelt next to her, looking at herself floating facedown in the pool. Charlotte looked around for Tucker Martell, but he wasn’t there. No one was there to help Brandy. She turned her head to look at the spirit next to her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Brandy put her arm around Charlotte’s shoulders, leaned over, and kissed her on the cheek. Charlotte felt Brandy’s ghostly breath on her cheek but the next moment the medal was taken out of her hand. The vision faded and Charlotte found herself kneeling in Brandy’s room, Jonas and Nash on either side of her. It had been Nash who had taken the medal from her shaking hand.

  “She didn’t see him,” Jonas stated softly, stroking her face.

  Charlotte shook her head.

  Alastair helped her to stand. “All right. Let’s get you home to rest.”

  As they moved out of the bedroom, Charlotte realized that the Hamlets weren’t there. They waited back in the living room. Ruth Hamlet stared at her with hot, angry eyes.

  “You were the girl,” she accused. “This is your fault.”

  Charlotte reeled back in Jonas’s arm, which was around her waist. Tears burned her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she told the woman.

  “Go to hell,” Ruth said.

  Disheartened, Charlotte left the house, stumbling outside. She thought she was going to be sick to her stomach. Jonas and Nash helped her into Alastair’s car and they crowded in on either side of her. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, suddenly more tired than she had ever felt in her life.

  “She’s just upset,” Alastair told her as he started up the car.

  “No, she’s right. We all know it,” Charlotte murmured, her eyes closed.

  “It’s grief,” Jonas replied as he stroked her hair. “The second stage is anger. She’s blaming you.”

  “She has a right to blame me.” Charlotte sighed. “I said I would accept the consequences. It hurts, though.”

  They rode back to her parents’ house in silence and when she got there, she excused herself and went up to her room. She knew there were things to do, a murderer to catch, but right now her brain couldn’t decipher any of the information from the vision. She needed a good cry, one that would wash away the self-pity as well as her guilt, because she couldn’t concentrate when depression set in.

  As much as she wanted to wallow in the unfairness of it all, for herself, for Brandy, even for the other cases she’d help solved, she couldn’t spare the emotion. Life was so fragile, so precious. How dare it be ripped away by a madman? And as much as she wanted to crawl into herself, Charlotte knew she couldn’t rest until the monster was caught. She just had to figure out how.

  Chapter Eight

  When she went downstairs later that evening, she saw Jonas, Nash, Alastair, and Holly sitting around the table. The rest of the house lay silent and dark.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked.

  “After last night’s revelations, Mom and Dad said they didn’t want to be around kids today,” Holly answered with a shrug. “Haven’t a clue why. I don’t know what Kira is doing. I don’t want to know what Kira is doing. And Delia was called into the hospital.”

  Charlotte slid into a chair and looked around at them. “So, what’s the plan?”

  Jonas and Nash glanced at each other. Alastair raised a brow.

  “What plan?” Holly asked.

  “I’ve been wracking my brain the past couple of hours going over everything so I figured you guys have also been down here thinking out a way to catch the bad guy.”

  “Other than what we’ve already set in motion,” Alastair replied. “No, not really.”

  She pursed her lips. “Okay. Then what’s set in motion?”

  Nash took her hand and linked their fingers. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  She gave him a perplexed look. “Of course I am. Why?”

  “Because you’ve been through something traumatic,” Jonas added.

  “I went through something traumatic twelve years ago,” she told him. She glanced around the table. “I’ve been thinking about this for hours and I’ve come to accept that I can’t change what happened back then. I can’t magically transport myself back to being eighteen years old and miraculously decide to tell the truth. But I can move forward. I can solve this case and bring this person to justice. I have to do that, otherwise I have no business helping anyone at all.”

  “Very well,” he murmured. “Then let’s go over it again. Tell us how you managed to get into the club.”

  “Twelve years ago I jumped the fence to swim in the pool. Tucker had been busted the weekend before for taking his father’s Mercedes for a quick spin around the block. So for punishment his father forced him to clean the club at night, luckily for me.”

  “And his alibi was checked,” Alastair reported. He leaned down and picked up a briefcase, pulling out a thick folder. “He said he didn’t hear Charlotte jumping the fence or swimming, but he heard someone hopping back over as he was giving her CPR.”

  “What’s that?” Charlotte asked.

  “Your file.”

  “File? What file?”

  “Everything I’ve collected over twelve years.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s a lot of paper.”

  Jonas leaned his elbows on the table. “Is the fence still there?”

  Alastair shook his head. “A wall’s been erected.”

  “So, someone had to let Brandy in,” he concluded. “Or let Brandy stay.”

  “Cameras?” Nash asked.

  “Only at the front and back door, but it showed nothing,” Alastair said as he handed out some papers from the file.

  “What about other cameras from other angles?” Nash asked.

  “This is Santa Monica,” Charlotte piped up. “There’s a camera somewhere.”

  “Traffic cam?” Nash asked.

  “Closest is an ATM across the street,” Alastair said. He handed Nash a picture. “It takes a photo every twenty seconds. Its camera is aimed at the swim club’s garage, so if anyone was leaving it might have snapped a photo of the vehicle, as long as they didn’t fall in those twenty seconds. I have a request for a warrant to get access to that video but the trouble is that the police have that footage so I’m waiting for them to acknowledge that and get back with me.”

  He was interrupted by his cell phone beeping. He checked his messages.r />
  “Something came up at HS,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “At night?” Holly asked.

  “No sleep for the weary,” he stated.

  “I thought that was no sleep for the wicked,” Charlotte said.

  “That’s no rest for the wicked,” Jonas corrected.

  “Right,” she said as she watched Alastair and Holly stand up. Her sister went to get their jackets and her purse.

  “I’ll call you later,” Holly told Charlotte, and a second later, they were out the door.

  Which left her alone with Nash and Jonas. Last night’s conversation flashed through her mind and she cleared her throat.

  “So, Nash, would you like to go out with me?” she asked him.

  Nash’s eyebrows shot up and glanced at Jonas, who stared at her with a mixture of resignation and worry upon his face.

  “All right,” Nash murmured. “What did you have in mind?”

  “A drive along the Pacific Coast Highway,” she said. “It’ll give us a chance to talk.”

  He gave one last look at Jonas before smiling at Charlotte and gesturing to the door. “After you.”

  * * * *

  As he pulled out her neighborhood, taking Ocean Avenue to the California incline which brought them onto the busy highway, Nash was keenly aware of his heart thumping in his chest. He was surprised he hadn’t had a heart attack yet. Holy hell, what was he supposed to talk about with Charlotte? Was this a date date or a friendly date? What were they going to talk about? The weather? The case? He hoped to hell it was about her favorite position. Missionary? Cowgirl? Reverse cowgirl?

  Fuck! Do not go there, McKnight!

  He squirmed a bit in his seat, wishing he could adjust his dick, which was now uncomfortably hard behind his zipper. Christ, he had to think of something to calm the fire in his blood. He had to act cool.

  Cool like Antarctica. Cool like ice. Cool like skinny dipping in a—fuck!

  “Are you okay?” she asked, cutting into his mental tirade.